‘Hair’ revival a hip trip for iconic rock musical
suntimes.com | Mar 3rd 2011
BY HEDY WEISS Theater Critic/[email protected]
07:53PM
“Everything in the show suggests the self-embellished style of the period, with
quirky military jackets, and peasant blouses, and ethnic fabrics and beads from
India and the Middle East, as well as jeans that have been embroidered on,
patched with lace an
When the moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars, there can
be only one astrological forecast, and it is this: The national touring
production of “Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical,” is about to arrive
on the stage of the Ford Center/Oriental Theatre.
Four decades after it opened at New York’s Public Theatre and subsequently
moved on to its Broadway debut (in radically altered form), the current
production promises to reinvent that fervent gathering of hippie “flower
children” of the 1960s, with all the chaos of the Vietnam War protests and
Civil Rights movement, and with the long locks, torn jeans, love beads and
pharmaceuticals that defined the era. In the process, it also should suggest
why “Hair” — with its book and lyrics by James Rado and Gerome Ragni, and music
by Canadian-bred composer Galt MacDermot — became such an emblem of its
generation, just as “Rent” would later become a theatrical marker for the
disaffected young artists and lovers of the AIDS-infected New York City of the
1990s.
The touring production is a remount of the Broadway edition that received the
2009 Tony Award for best revival of a musical, and features direction by Diane
Paulus (the conversation-generating artistic director of the American Repertory
Theater in Cambridge, Mass.), and choreography by Karole Armitage (the longtime
punk-modern dance favorite of the “downtown” scene).
“Hair” was not only the first “rock musical” to hit Broadway (where it was
produced by Chicago-bred millionaire Michael Butler), but it clearly was
designed to shock the “bourgeois audiences” accustomed to very different
material at the time. In spinning the story of Claude — the long-haired leader
of “a tribe” of New York hippies who is faced with a grave dilemma after he is
drafted (should he burn his draft card and become a resister, or should he join
the military?) — it engaged in some pretty fierce political irreverance, along
with a good deal of obscenity and much talk of psychedelic drug use and sexual
liberation. A song about sodomy, and yes, even that infamous nude scene, also
were part of the mix.
“None of that is shocking anymore,” said Paulus, 45, who was just a toddler
when “Hair” first hit the stage. (She heard the album for the show at a
friend’s house at age nine, saw the 1979 film version with her older brother,
and started delving into all the “Hair” lore as she began working in the
theater and writing her senior thesis as a Harvard undergraduate on “the living
theater” movement that inspired much of the show’s original staging.)
“That’s why when James [Rado] and Galt (MacDermott] and I began talking about a
revival of ‘Hair’ for its 40th anniversary, we decided to forget about the
shock element,” Paulus said. “What we wanted to do above all was to create
something that would make audiences feel. We wanted them to be moved by the
story. So we went back to the libretto, and focused more tightly on the journey
of Claude — a guy who loves his country, who is so conflicted about what it
means to be an American, and whose ‘tribe’ tries to save him, but ultimately
can’t.”
“There is a whole generation or more in the audience now that doesn’t really
understand what being drafted meant at that time, and how you could go to jail
for burning your draft card and resisting,” said Paulus. “So we tried to
clarify that. We also had to help open up our cast to understanding and feeling
it all because most of them — and in Chicago you will be seeing some of the
best performers from the New York and London productions, as well as others
specially chosen for this tour — are between just 18 and twentysomething.
“Many of them talked to their parents, grandparents and other relatives about
the era for the first time, and came back with such powerful stories — about
serving in Vietnam as a soldier or a nurse, or about being on a U.S. military
base in Germany and tagging body bags.”
Before collaborating on “Hair,” the show’s writers, Rado and Ragni, watched the
genesis and evolution of the 1960s firsthand, though from somewhat different
perches.
“We were both active actors in New York at the time, though I was more
connected to the world of Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Gerry (who died in 1991)
was more involved in the experimental scene of The Living Theatre and Joseph
Chaikin’s Open Theatre, which were big influences on our show,” said Rado. “We
observed the strange, enticing world of the hippies come to life while this
country was embroiled in the Vietnam War, and while all the racial issues
played themselves out. And we felt the sexual revolution taking place, and all
the new ideas about openness and freedom and liberation.”
“We knew we wanted a contemporary pop music sound,” said Rado, who already was
writing pop songs and revues in New York. “And we saw the possibility of
creating a sort of fusion type of music on Broadway — a work propelled by the
lyrics, but in a rock vein. Of course The Beatles were the background music of
the time, as was Elvis Presley. We became aware of Galt [McDermott] because
he’d had a big single hit with a song called ‘African Waltz,’ and he had worked
with choruses, and jazz, and church music and funk, and also had his own unique
style.”
The show’s director of record became Chicago-bred Tom O’Horgan, whose work Rado
(who played the original Claude) and Ragni (the irreverant Berger) had seen at
La Mama E.T.C., an early outpost of New York’s avant-garde. Joining Ragni and
Rado in the cast were unknowns Shelley Plimpton (mother of Steppenwolf ensemble
member Martha Plimpton), and Diane Keaton.
“Shelley came to the audition with an electric guitarist and sang ‘With a
Little Help From My Friends,’ and by the end we were all in tears,” Rado
recalled. “And Diane was eliminated from the last cut of the audition, but
earlier I had seen stars twinkling in her eyes as she stood beside the piano,
and I called her back at the last minute.”
For Paulus, who will be represented here soon by a very different, high-tech
show when Chicago Opera Theater presents her staging of Tod Machover’s “Death
and the Powers” at the Harris Theatre in April, the chance to stage “Hair” came
as “a double gift.”
“I grew up thinking I’d missed my decade,” she said. “Political involvement was
in my bones from very early on. And my interest in theater has always been
rooted in the fact that it is a group activity and is better for being part of
a community. ‘Hair’ is the epitome of both things.”
Of course the musical also comes with a distinctive fashion vibe, and Michael
McDonald, who designed the costumes for the revival, reveled in the eclecticism
of the 1960s.
“This production began as just a 40th anniversary concert, and I decided to
celebrate the entire generation, rather than homing in on this specific tribe,”
said McDonald. “That universal approach carried over when we finally went to
Broadway, so if you look closely you will see, along with the Greenwich Village
hippies, the influences of the Monterey Pop Festival hippies, the Gold Gate
Park hippies, the L. A. hippies, the European hippies. I wanted a lot more than
John Lennon spectacles and tie-dyed shirts. In fact, I forbid tie-died
anything. I gathered vintage pieces from all over the country and from England
that we lovingly recreated, and I watched tons of archival video on YouTube,
including the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968,
to see what people were really wearing.
“Everything in the show suggests the self-embellished style of the period, with
quirky military jackets, and peasant blouses, and ethnic fabrics and beads from
India and the Middle East, as well as jeans that have been embroidered on,
patched with lace and hand painted.
“And be sure to look at Claude’s big sheepskin cape, and that beautiful
crazy-quilt vest made of vintage velvet pieces.” said the designer. “They are
my favorites.”
Original Page:
http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/stage/4097007-421/hair-revival-a-hip-trip-for-iconic-rock-musical.html
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